Saturday, November 12, 2016

It seems fitting that 3R’s characterize the Trump-GOP
legislative program since it was the lack of 3R’s—an old-fashioned, old-timey
way to say education—that catapulted Trump to the White House, as uneducated
white voters, and many educated ones, too, were so blinded by fear of “the
other” that they believed Trump’s lies.

What we see in Trump’s legislative ideas is a wish list from
the extreme right that will please very wealthy people and eventually
disappoint everyone else accept those that think the function of government is
to suppress minorities. If fully implemented, Trump’s legislative program will
lead to a worldwide recession or depression, repression of civil rights and a regression
backwards in time that erases the economic and social progress we have made
over the past eight years.

Let’s take the proposals Trump and the GOP have put on the
table topic by topic.

Taxes

Trump and the GOP may engineer the largest tax break for the
wealthy in American history, including the Reagan and Bush II cuts. If Trump
gets his way, the tax cuts will skew in favor of those whose wealth is tied up
in land, but those who own financial assets will also make out like bandits.
Large multinational companies storing billions of dollars in profit abroad will
be able to repatriate their earnings at a bargain-basement rate of 10%.

Lower taxes on the wealthy and less revenue for the federal
government to dispense will eventually lead to a deep recession, as it did
under Bush II. Rich folk will invest
their wealth in financial and collectible bubbles, as they always do. No new
jobs will be created, because it is not money that is holding back big
companies from investing in growth today, but the lack of market growth
potential. That lack of a market derives because the middle class and poor have
less money than they used to, partially because the government, starved of
resources, does not funnel as much money to these groups—AKA the 99%--as they
could if taxes were higher. Lower taxes on the wealthy means less money for education,
infrastructure maintenance, food stamps, mass transit. Lower taxes on the wealthy
also means more money to feed financial bubbles. We’ve seen this before, not
just in the United States but throughout history. The asset bubble bursts and it
always turns out badly for the economy.

Infrastructure
Investment

Trump is living in a free-market dream world if he thinks
that his infrastructure financing plan will work. He wants to provide tax
incentives to the private sector, which will then rebuild our highways and
bridges and expand our mass transit systems. How will the private sector make
money on roads and trolley lines? Only by jacking up prices, ignoring the
public benefit of building certain roads and routes because they’re
unprofitable and hammering down employee wages. The private sector always goes
after the money, which may result in rebuilding municipal water systems only in
wealthy communities. We’ve tried private sector solutions to prisons and the
military and failed miserably. Advanced studies show that when you take into
account the wealth and disabilities of the student base, private schools
underperform public schools in educating children. There are just certain basic societal needs
that government must finance, address and manage, and infrastructure is first
among them.

Immigration

Trump is still talking about funding a wall between the
United States and Mexico and he still thinks Mexico will “reimburse” us for its
construction. While he intends to have the private sector pay for roads,
bridges, mass transit, waterways and sewers, he wants Congress to pass a law
that has our taxes laying out the money for this unneeded monstrosity, this
money pit that will provide no benefit save a temporary spike in construction
jobs. I said “laying out money,” but only a died-in-wool, brainwashed
Trumpsterite could believe that Mexico will pay even one penny for Trump’s
folly. The rest of his immigration program presents new harsh penalties for
breaking existing immigration laws, but nothing else.

Healthcare

If not stopped by healthcare industry lobbyists, Trump and
the GOP could plunge the U.S. healthcare system into chaos, especially if they
rescind Obamacare before replacing it. Getting rid of Obamacare will not only
take away the health insurance of 20 million people, it will precipitously end
three policies that helped everyone: 1) The removal of the cap on lifetime
coverage; 2) the rule that someone cannot be denied insurance for a
pre-existing condition; 3) allowing children to remain on their parent’s health
insurance policy until age 26. Now if Congress should pass a law that keeps
these important benefits but doesn’t mandate the kind of universal coverage
that Obamacare does, health insurers will be forced to jack up rates.

As with everything else, Trump and the GOP favor what they
call “market-based” and private solutions to address America’s healthcare
needs. They think that making it easier for health insurers to cross state
lines (they already do so, but with unique corporate entities in each state
responding to the local regulations in each state) and letting people create
tax-free Health Savings Accounts will bring down the cost of healthcare. It
won’t happen, but it will shift the burden of paying for health insurance from
the government and businesses to individuals. Another proposal, to let states
manage Medicaid funds, will enable those in right-wing states to reallocate
dollars from helping the poor to other uses.

Obamacare isn’t perfect, but building on it makes a lot more
sense than ripping it up in favor of “market” solutions shown not to work. I’m
guessing that once the healthcare lobby gets through beating up Congress that
whatever they call healthcare reform will end up keeping just about all of
Obamacare.

Defense

Trump wants to end the sequestration of funds that has
automatically cut federal government spending every year since 2013 for the
military only and begin expanding military investment. He doesn’t really have a
plan for what he will do with the extra money, but we do know that the Pentagon
wants to develop a new generation of nuclear weapons and continue development
of robot weapons that would make seek-and-kill decisions. Narcissists like
Trump always like shiny new toys. Congressional Republicans are still following
the Reagan playbook, which consists of cutting taxes primarily on the wealthy
while increasing defense spending to starve the social services part of the
government and at the same time create enormous deficits which, when interest
rates are high, translate into safe bond investments for the wealthy. I will give Trump the benefit of the doubt and
say that I am unsure whether he will ever want to use American military might,
but there is no doubt that he joins fellow Republicans in wanting to build it
up and never pay for it.

Safety and Security

This part is where the scary repression comes in. Trump has
proposed a number of laws that he says will address “surging crime, drugs and
violence.” Of course, crime is not surging, nor is violence, except in
households that own firearms. But much of Trump’s demagoguery revolves around
the notion that we are unsafe. Here is an area in which Trump could take
ownership of Obama-era statistics and declare victory, but I believe that
Congressional Republicans relish the opportunity to grab more civil rights, to create
more selling opportunities for gun manufacturers by underwriting greater
weaponization of local police and to encourage harsh police-state tactics in
minority areas. The racist undertones of the Trump campaign, his own history of
racism and the desire for Republicans to disenfranchise the African-American
community may lead to a generation of federal Jim Crow laws that also affect
Latinos and Muslims, all in the guise of protecting us from a non-existent
crime wave.

The Trump legislative plan marks the apotheosis of the
Reagan political strategy: Play on the racism, nativism and religiosity of working
and middle class whites to make them believe that their best interests lie with
the wealthy, pretend that the social service network being shredded only serves
minorities, while pretending that tax cuts help everyone and not just those at
the top.

Friday, November 11, 2016

Donald Trump has released an
ambitious if highly general plan for the first one hundred days of his
administration. He calls it a contract, and like virtually all contracts, its
literary value is nonexistent. As a document for change, it should frighten
everyone, those who didn’t vote for him and those who did.

The document consists of two parts,
things he thinks can do as the executive and things he will ask Congress to do.
This article looks at what he intends to do as head of a vast
regulation-creating bureaucracy. In a different article, we’ll consider his
program for Congress.

The executive’s part of Trump’s
“100-day action plan to Make America Great Again” consists of four types of
actions: 1) A few good ideas; 2) Things we already do and have done for a
while; 3) General actions that are inherently bad because they deny his Administration
the flexibility to address each problem in the best way possible; 4) Specific
actions that will harm us economically or in other ways.

The good, the done, the bad and the
ugly. Let’s look at these categories:

The Good

Trump wants to impose a five-year
ban on White House officials becoming lobbyists after government service and a
lifetime ban on lobbying on behalf of foreign governments; note he doesn’t
include foreign corporations. He also wants to impose a complete ban on foreign
lobbyists raising money for any American election. He will propose a
constitutional amendment imposing term limits on members of Congress. All these
moves will help reduce the influence of corporate and wealthy interests on our
federal government, although none would help as much as appointing a Supreme
Court justice who would vote to overturn the Citizens United decision.

He also proposes allocating funds
to fix our water and environmental infrastructure, although he proposes to fund
it by cancelling financial obligations to United Nation climate change
programs, which makes no sense for two reasons: 1) the UN programs are also
important to address the climate change he claims is not occurring; and 2) the
money we spend on these programs represent a small drop in a very large bucket
as far as what we have to expend to fix our city’s aging sewer systems, secure
our coastal regions and improve our ability to withstand future extreme weather
events.

The Done

During the election, Trump made a
number of false accusations regarding the way the federal government handles
basic functions, such as searching for undocumented immigrants who are
criminals and administering trade deals and regulations. He thus now has to
make a big show of doing things the right way. His ego demands it. I’m sure
that after a few months he’ll release statistics that show Obama era
improvements, take credit for them and declare victory. Here are the actions he
proposes that we are already doing quite well. In all these areas, we are
already doing everything we can to the extent that the law allows. For Trump to
attempt more, he would have to break the law and he would likely end up impeded
by lawsuits and constraining orders:

·Identifying foreign trade abuses that unfairly
impact American workers and use every means possible under current law to end
any abuses uncovered.

·Launch a program to identify and remove all
criminal undocumented immigrants.

·Suspend immigration from regions in which safe
vetting of refugees cannot safely occur.

·Implement “extreme vetting,” something we
already do.

·Cancel every unconstitutional action, memorandum
and order issued by Obama: if any unconstitutional actions existed, the
courts would have already canceled them!

The other thing Trump will do that
has been done already is name a Supreme Court Justice to replace Antonin
Scalia. If his appointment enables a new conservative majority on the Supreme
Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, I wonder how the nine percent of white women who
believe in a woman’s right to an abortion but who nevertheless voted for Trump
will feel—they turned the election.

The Bad

Trump insists he will implement a
number of very rigid actions that apply across the board to all Administrative
branches. These actions represent management strategies that are known to fail
because they are too inclusive and deny organizations the flexibility they need
to address specific problems. Here are the bad management techniques Trump
wishes to implement:

·Freeze all federal hiring not related to the
military or public health and safety to reduce the federal workforce through
attrition.

·Require that for every new government
regulation, two existing regulations must be eliminated.

For Trump seriously to implement
these two misguided principles he would have to cut into necessary and expected
government services or to gut further the oversight that the government
exercises over state governments and industries. Federal government employment
is at a low point right now when we take a look at the post-World War II era.
May agencies such as the Internal Revenue Service and the Environmental
Protection Agency are already seriously understaffed.

The Ugly

Most of the specific actions Trump
wants to take will inflict short- and/or long-term pain on the economy and
American workers.

The most damage derives by his actions related to energy policy. Trump says he
is going to lift Obama roadblocks to oil and gas development projects like the
Keystone Pipeline and lift restrictions on the domestic production of shale,
oil, natural gas and coal. By focusing on increasing domestic fossil energy
supplies he makes a fateful decision: to develop fossil fuels instead of
alternative energy and energy conservation. Let’s forget the deleterious impact
on the environment that this decision will have and focus on the economic
impact. There is currently a surplus of fossils fuel that has driven prices
down significantly, in part as corporations and governments react to the global
warming that Trump still denies. Figuring in inflation, American gas pump
prices are the lowest in years. At this point, all the fossil fuel transmitted
along the proposed Keystone pipeline will end up being sold to China, which
will enrich the Canadian producers, but not Americans. If we want to sell more
fossil fuels abroad, we will face some pretty stiff competition from Saudi
Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Venezuela and Russia.

By contrast, when it comes to competition
in the emerging alternative fuels industry, only China can rival U.S. technical
prowess. Pushing alternative fuels should be a major plank in any job-creation
program of the early 21st century. Unfortunately, it’s a simple fact that
anything that lowers the price of oil and natural gas hurts the alternative
fuel industry, which is one of our major growth industries today and well into
the future.

Three actions Trump promises in the
area of trade could be disastrous. He wants to renegotiate the North American
Trade Agreement (NAFTA), walk away from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and
label China a currency manipulator. Whether you think NAFTA was a good or bad
idea in 1992, let’s take a look at it today, when it supplies millions of jobs
to American workers. Renegotiation in and of itself could be a good thing,
especially if it leads to higher wages for workers in all three countries. But
I have a feeling that Trump really wants to end NAFTA, which will put a lot of
Americans out of work. Walking away from TPP would drive our trading partners
to make a deal with China that doesn’t include us. Instead we should renegotiate
TPP to make sure that the countries party to it comply with wage, environmental
and our product and workplace safety regulations and to make sure it does not
give corporations the right to sue governments.

Labeling China a currency
manipulator will get us off on the wrong foot with a country that could be a
friend or a foe. Strange that Trump is making rapprochements to Russia while
poking a stick into China’s eye. When we take a look at the two countries, the
size of their armies, their intentions beyond their own borders, the business
opportunities represented by their respective domestic markets, and the way
their interests coincide or clash with ours, selecting Russia over China makes
no sense at all. Unless, of course, those close to the Russian government have
invested a lot into your companies.

The final specific action Trump
will take chills free speech, hurts the economy and wreaks havoc on anyone who
depends on city services like mass transit to survive. It is also likely
illegal and will embroil the Trump Administration in a large number of lawsuits
it is likely to lose: Trump says he is going to cancel all federal funding to
sanctuary cities, which are municipalities that adopt policies not to prosecute people solely for being undocumented.
Imagine the economic chaos Trump will create by withdrawing all federal funding
fromNew York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas,
Philadelphia, San Francisco, Washington DC, Seattle, Oakland, San Jose,
Baltimore, the Portland on both coasts and other major cities that have taken
seriously the concept of local control that Trump touts for education, wage
rates and women’s health issues.

I suspect that if Trump really
implements this hodgepodge of ideas—a few good but most not only bad but based
on economic and governmental naivety—it will be enough to sink the U.S. economy
with no help from Congressional Republicans.

Thursday, November 10, 2016

Donald Trump by himself can’t get anything done. Like any
president, he needs an army of managers, economists, engineers, attorneys,
spokespersons and other professional foot soldiers to head and staff departments
and agencies to get the actual work done and documented.

We already know that when it comes to getting his way,
Donald Trump is amoral, unethical and in many cases unconcerned with the
legality of his actions, as long as he doesn’t get exposed. What will happen
when the new president asks one or more of his many supernumeraries to engage
in illegal or dangerous activities? To create an enemies
list? To spy on those who his thin-skin thinks has insulted him? To use the
Internal Revenue Service and other branches of government to punish his enemies
or reward his friends? To put pressure on someone suing him? To transfer U.S.
assets to a Russian bank? To do something specifically for one of his many
business ventures?

Let’s journey back to the early 1970s to learn what will
happen when a professional in government is asked to do something illegal.
Watergate, like the Iran-Contra scandal, the justification for the second war
in Iraq and the creation of the torture gulag, required dozens of people to discuss
and engage in illegal activities. But I want to focus on one incident, the
Saturday Night Massacre.

Archibald Cox, the special Watergate prosecutor had decided
to subpoena Nixon to get the tapes he had made of all Oval Office
conversations. Those tapes would show that President Nixon knew about the
Watergate break-in, other dirty tricks and the cover-up of said activities. Nixon
naturally balked at handing over the incriminating material. On Saturday,
October 20, 1973, Nixon ordered Elliot Richardson, the Attorney General, to
fire Cox. Richardson, as rib-rocked and loyal a Republican as one could find,
refused and resigned. Nixon then ordered the Deputy Attorney General William
Ruckelshaus, another dyed-in-the-wool, lifelong Republican, to fire Cox.
Ruckelshaus also resigned rather than do it.

But there is always some careerist, some amoral technician,
willing to do the dirty work of a powerful person. In the case of Watergate it
was Robert Bork, the Solicitor General, who fired Archibald Cox.

The story has a relatively happy ending. A judge declared
the firing illegal. Nixon had to resign. And Bork was rejected when Ronald
Regan nominated him to the Supreme Court. The country got a modicum of election
finance reform…at least until the Citizens
United decision.

The broader point is that there is always someone willing to
break the law for our leader. Always an Oliver North willing to buy and sell
arms illegally and give the proceeds to an army that Congress had explicitly
put off limits. Always a John Yoo to come up with complicated legal-sounding
mumbo-jumbo to justify illegal torturing of other human beings. And what’s most
scary, is that there are always honorable men like General Colin Powell or Vice
President Hubert Humphrey who will place a single indelible stain on their
reputation to follow the commander’s orders and treat what he knows are
unsubstantiated or already disproven rumors as the truth.

In 1927, the French thinker Julien Bendel wrote in The Betrayal of the Intellectuals (in
French, La Trahison des Clercs) that the
intellectuals—the high level knowledge workers like attorneys, engineers,
economists, writers—betrayed the ethics and principles of their professions to
support the self-serving ideas and proposals of governments, politicians and
the wealthy that they knew were wrong or unprovable. He wrote specifically
about the many European intellectuals who became apologists for crass nationalism, warmongering
and racism in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Be they historians, political
scientists, economists, philosophers or theologians, they betrayed the very
foundational principles of their disciplines with false arguments justifying
racism or a particular war. The intellectual who sells out is a standard
character in 20th and 21st century world fiction, be it the fascistic Willy
Stark’s press secretary Jack Burden in All
the King’s Men or the Jewish physicist Victor Strum in Life and Fate. In real life, we have Edward Teller, Kellyanne
Conway and George Will.

Benda never got
into why intellectuals betrayed themselves (and society), but today, we do it
for money.

That’s why I fear
for this country over the next few years. I fear that a lot of talented
educated people will participate in a campaign to reign in our free press,
harass the political opposition and further suppress the vote. I fear that when
President Trump orders the military to drop a bomb—conventional or nuclear—because
of a momentary whim he will find a general willing to implement the order. One
whose family probably has access to a well-stocked bomb shelter.

But it’s only
four years.

I expect Trump to
be a one-term president. His past is just too littered with illegal or
unethical actions for him not to do something so obnoxious or illegal that
Congress is forced to impeach him. Or, the GOP may impeach and convict him
quickly, to gain their revenge and install one of their own, Mike Pence, in the
White House. I reckon that the
likelihood of Trump dying in office, or being assassinated, is very high. I do
not believe the American government participated in the assassination of John
F. Kennedy, but I would wonder about the U.S. military’s involvement if Trump
should take a bullet.

Even if Trump
survives impeachment and assassination, he will rightfully be blamed for the
world-wide depression that implementing ever one of his or the Republican
platform’s half-baked economic ideas would cause. Unless Mike Pence is
president because of Trump’s passing, the Republicans will likely have most of
the country angry at them for one of any number of betrayals by 2020.
African-Americans, Hispanics, the LGBTQ community and left-leaning Democrats
and independents will likely have a good chance of turning the tide and beat
back the politics of selfishness and racist nativism among whites that
catapulted Trump to the presidency.

Wednesday, November 9, 2016

We just rejected the most presidential, qualified candidate
in history to vote for a mentally ill buffoon who spews hate speech and has no
impulse control.

We voted against someone who has studied every issue and
developed a reasoned approach to each so we could vote for someone who has
displayed total ignorance and confusion on the basics of what constitutes
abortion, foreign trade, contemporary business practices, military strategy and
tactics and a wide range of other important matters.

Surveys say Americans want to protect and strengthen Social
Security, yet white people voted for the candidate whose platform wants to gut
this successful program. Surveys say we believe in a woman’s right to have an
abortion, yet whites voted for someone who says he wants to restrict those
rights. Surveys say we are wary of Russian motives, yet we voted for a Putin
apologist. Surveys show that a whopping
64% of all Americans worry about the effects of climate change, yet we whites
voted for someone who denies that climate change is occurring.

In the 2016 election, whites have done what they—what
we--have been doing since the election of Ronald Reagan—we voted against our
own interests.

Why?

Because the majority of whites are
racists? Because they secretly don’t think women capable of leading? Because we
secretly want an autocrat, no matter how erratic?

I am ashamed of the color of my skin this morning, but I
don’t place the primary blame on whites. I blame the mass media for
manipulating the fears and prejudices of whites and putting profits above ethics.

It was the mass media that decided that a clownish failed
real estate developer would play the role of a titan of business on TV. When
Trump started doing “The Apprentice,” his real estate empire was in shambles.
He was involved in thousands of lawsuits. The New York real estate industry
considered him a buffoon. He had mismanaged his family’s fortunes so much that
the Trumps were worth much less than if he had invested in mutual funds that
track the S&P 500. But the media
bought into Trump’s narcissistic self-delusions of business genius and by doing
so validated them to the world. Most importantly, the media created the
“celebrity culture” that glorifies selfish consumption and reduces all issues
to personal opinions, not the analysis of reality and facts.

The news media also bought into and publicized the
inaccurate image of Hillary Clinton that Republicans assiduously created. It
took years of bullshit investigations and false rumors, years of characterizing
her speeches as unexciting and her program as uninspiring, never with any
examples, since the examples would all prove the opposite. The news media followed
the GOP playbook. It also applied a double standard that blamed Hillary for
mistakes her peers also made and set a higher standard for evaluating her words
and actions.

Once Trump announced his run, it was the mass media who took
him seriously, giving his campaign far more coverage than what they gave to
other Republicans and the Democratic candidates. His insults and lies dominated the news
pages.

Finally, until very late in the campaign, the news media
refused to call Trump on his obvious lies. Illegal immigration from Mexico has been
negative for several years now, meaning more undocumented migrants are crossing
back into Mexico than are sneaking into the United States. Crime is down. Police
deaths are down. Acts of terrorism are way down. African-Americans do not for
the most part live in warzones. There is no such thing as an abortion in the
eighth month. Putin did invade the Ukraine. The list of Trump’s big and little
lies go on and on and on and on. But until Trump made the outrageous claim that
Hillary Clinton started the “birther” rumors and he ended them, the mainstream
media reported what he said, but never told us it was a pack of lies. I
understand that NBC producers were sitting on tapes which proved Trump
assaulted women and showed him using the “n” word, but they released them.

One of the network executives said during the primary
campaign that Trump might not be good for the country, but he was good for
ratings, and therefore made the networks a ton of money.

No consolation, but that worm is going to turn very quickly.
Economists and pundits are already talking and writing about a Trump recession.
By itself, any one of several Trump proposals will throw the country and the
world in to a deep economic crisis. Rounding up and kicking out 11 million
people will do it. Taking health
insurance away from 20 million people—the net effect of rescinding
Obamacare—will do it. Entering into a trade war with China or Europe will do
it. Lowering taxes on the wealthy will do it. Building a wall on our southern
border for hundreds of billions of dollars will do it. Withdrawing from trade
agreements will do it.

In other words, it’s likely that the media moguls who put
profits first will see their investment portfolios take a big hit and then take
years, if not decades to recover. The media itself will find itself under much
greater scrutiny during the administration of an autocrat, if Trump makes good
on his revenge threats and his threat to pass libel laws that infringe on press
freedom.

So the news media will suffer for their sins. Poetic
justice, except the rest of us will also suffer.

And maybe we deserve to suffer, at least white people.
Although I blame the news media for manipulating us, upholding the wrong values
and turning its back on the truth, we swallowed the nonsense. We swallowed it
because it confirmed the deep-seated racism, sexism and jingoism that it
appears most white still have. Because of voter suppression laws passed
by Republican legislatures in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Ohio and
other swing states, there were not enough African-American and Hispanic voters
to compensate for the failings of the white voter.

I would like personally to apologize to the African-American
and Hispanic communities, who saw through the garbage and voted for Hillary. I
would like to apologize to millennials, who will have to live a long time in
the dystopic world Trump and the GOP want to create. It would be grandiose to
apologize on behalf of all white people, so I do so for myself and my family.

This morning, I am as ashamed of my color and my nationality
as I could ever be.

If it weren’t for the entertainment value, I’d be pleased that Texas Governor Rick Perry is foundering in the Republican presidential race. After all, Governor Perry, who is in an unprecedented fourth term as chief executive of the nation's second-largest state, still might get the Republican nomination for president. If that happens there’s no telling what the voters might be fooled into doing. Just look at how far George W. Bush got.